THE MAIDEN WAY. Five Notes. By R. G. COLLINGWOOD. Trans. Cumb. and Westm. Ant. Soc., N.S. 30, pp. 116—17. 1930
Read near Alston, July 11th, 1929. 

91 The name Maiden Way refers properly to the Roman I road from Kirkby Thore by Whitley Castle to Carvoran. It is so used by Camden, and the name can be traced back to the twelfth century (Holm Cultram, p. 65, Maydengathe, Maidingate, Maidengate, occurring C. 1179 and 1294). Later usage has sometimes extended it to the road running north from Birdoswald to Bewcastle; but this seems to be an invention of the antiquaries of the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, and is objectionable because it is based on the idea that this road is a continuation of the Kirkby Thore—Carvoran road, which it is not. Sometimes, too, the name has been applied to the road running north, from the neighbourhood of Tebay, over the moors east of Shap. This is still worse, because it implies that this road runs to Kirkby Thore, whereas the truth seems to be that it goes to Brougham. It remains that we should restrict our use of the name to the only road in our district which has an ancient customary right to it, viz, the road between Kirkby Thore and Carvoran.

Its meaning has been often discussed, and I have only one point to add to what was said many years ago by Haverfield (these Trans. o.s. xiv, 428). That he was right in connecting the name with some folklore ascribing the origin of certain roads to certain legendary or mythical maidens, is indubitable. He was also, I think, right in suggesting that there must be some connexion between the various Maiden Ways and the various Maiden Castles - The exact nature of these connexions is not easy to trace. If a maiden castle means an untaken or impregnable castle, as seems not improbable then a maiden way may be a road leading to such a castle; and it is at least conceivable that the legendary maidens who are connected with such castles and roads are originally inventions of the popular imagination to explain a figure of speech whose original meaning had been forgotten. We know from the present case (among others) that the name goes right back into the middle ages. 

A legend like the “Dream of Maxen Wledig “in the Mabinogion, which tells us how the maiden Helen had fortresses built for herself in different parts of Wales, and caused roads (known to this day as Sarnau Helen) to be made connecting them with one another, also dates back to the middle ages; but, for all that, it may be less ancient than the name of which it seems designed to offer an explanation. I am disposed to think (i) that (as the ‘ Dream” itself seems to suggest) a maiden way is so called originally because it leads to or from a maiden castle; (ii) that (as is suggested by the commonness of maiden castles, many of them obviously remarkable for their strength) a maiden castle originally means an untaken or impregnable one; and (iii) that the maiden-legends are subsequent aetiological myths.

The maiden castle implied, on this view, by our Maiden Way is not far to seek. It leads to Carvoran, and the name Carvoran presumably means nothing else than Maiden Castle (caer forwyn from morwyn, a maiden). My attention was called to this derivation by our member Mr. E. B. Birley, and it seems to me to provide the simplest explanation of the name of the road. The name Carvoran obviously dates back to the time when Cymric speakers still lived in the Tyne valley, but did not know the Romano-British name of the place.

Two Roman Mountain-Roads. By R G. COLLINGWOOD TCW2 37 1937, 1-12


THE MAIDEN WAY. 
The Maiden Way, which runs due north and south where we stand on it, is a Roman road beginning at Kirkby Thore, two miles south of us on the York-Carlisle main road, and going by way of Whitley Castle near Alston to Carvoran on Hadrian’s Wall. It is in one sense not so mountainous as High Street, of which I was speaking yesterday; instead of rising to 2700 feet it only rises to 2200, at a point 21 miles N.W. of the summit of Cross Fell; but the gradient by which it attains that level is very severe. In one place it climbs 500 ft. in a third of a mile, which represents an average gradient of i in 31 for 6oo yards on end. The whole ascent of the Cross Fell escarpment from Kirkland to the summit involves a climb of 16oo feet in 3 miles. On the other side, the gradients are less severe. The road swings to the right and descends along a tongue of land pointing towards Alston; then it swerves to the left, crosses Aglionby beck, and climbs to the Alston-Hartside road, crossing it at the little plantation where we stopped to look at it six years ago on the occasion of our last visit to Alston. It rises again to nearly 1650 feet and then passes Whitley Castle, after which it runs down the left bank of the North Tyne and so to Carvoran.

From Kirkby Thore to Whitley Castle, the distance in a straight line is 15 miles; by the Roman road it is a little over 15.1, an excess of only about 3.3 per cent. But although the road is little longer than the straight line, it is nowhere at all straight after it has once left Kirkland it is curving gently, this way or that, all the time; a typical mountain-road.

In 1930, when I said a few words about this road (Trans. N.S. XXX, 116-7), I confined myself to discussing the significance of its name. I argued that a Maiden Way (which of course has nothing to do with the Celtic Mai dun, high ridge) means a way leading to a Maiden castle; which this one does, for it leads to Carvoran, and Carvoran must be Caer Jorwyn, the castle of the maiden, morwyn. To-day I propose to say something of its use. It is an odd line for a road to take; almost as odd as High Street itself. It cannot have been needed for the purpose of communications between the neighbourhood of Appleby and that of Haltwhistle; all traffic could well afford to go round by Carlisle, or if they expected to be in such a hurry they could have made a loop-line from Old Penrith to Lanercost or Birdoswald by way of Castle Carrock. It is the only Roman road in the whole of the mass of moors that stretches from Stainmore to the Tyne, and if the Romans had really wanted to penetrate and police that country they would, I feel sure, have aimed more for its centre, and run their road up Weardale and over the hill by Nenthead, or up the Tees from Greta Bridge by Middleton. Nor do I think that there was any large native population in the Alston district that needed policing. No evidence of it has ever come to light. In Dr. Raistrick’s maps* of Bronze Age objects in the north of England that whole moorland district appears as a huge blank.

Nor can we argue that because they had a fort at Whitley Castle they must have a road to get to it. According to Roman ways of thinking, forts are made for the sake of roads, not roads for the sake of forts. If you have a road 25 miles long, as this one is, from Kirkby Thore to Carvoran, you are pretty well bound to have a fort half-way along it, because in Britain at any rate the custom is to allow about 12 miles, as a rule, between fort and fort; so that, unless we can discover any special reason for placing a fort near Alston, we should be wisest to assume that it was a mere corollary to the building of the road, and begin by trying to explain that.

In 1930, when we met at Alston, Mr. Norman Walton read us a paper on the history of the Alston mines. In the course of that paper he remarked that the Romans, with their keen interest in mining, were not likely to have neglected the rich lead-ores of that district. I remember that in the discussion I threw some cold water on this suggestion, asking for some positive evidence in favour of it and implying that there was none. I was wrong. Since then I have been collecting all the evidence I can find bearing on Roman mining in Britain and find in a very early volume of Archaeologia Aeliana (A. A.,ser. 1, iv, p. 6; cf. these Trans. os. i, p. it.) the statement that during some excavations at Whitley Castle pieces of galena and fluorspar were found. Galena or lead sulphide is the common lead-ore; fluorspar is a mineral found in association with it in Derbyshire and also, I believe, in the Alston district. This discovery provides the missing link in the evidence. We are now entitled to say that the Alston Moor lead-field was no exception to the rule that
the Romans prospected systematically for lead and worked it wherever it could be found. In the light of this conclusion the purpose of the Maiden Way is clear. It was the road giving access to the Alston mines, and Whitley Castle was the fort where a body of soldiers controlled the mines and the smelting and desilverizing of their produce.

This inference has been brilliantly confirmed by recent work on another class of evidence. Our member Mr. Ian Richmond, in the last volume of Transactions (N.s. xxxvi, 104), has reconsidered the significance of the lead sealings which have been found in such large numbers at the Roman fort of Brough-under-Stainmore. He shows that they indicate an opening and re-distribution, at that fort, 
of packages derived from various sources; and the contents were not letters or despatches, for these were sealed with wax. He points out that in part, at least, it consisted of produce from mines; for one of the sealings bears the reverse stamp neal(lum), and on the obverse the name of the second Nervian cohort, already known from an inscription as the garrison of Whitley Castle. He infers that there resided at Brough-under-Stainmore a financial officer, a procurator’s agent, engaged in clearing certain kinds of produce sent in by garrisons in his district; among these, lead and silver from Alston.
My purpose in this note is to support Mr. Richmond’s inference by arguing that, from the first, the Alston lead- mines were the objective which the builders of the Maiden Way had in view. We learn from Tacitus that its mineral wealth was one of the things that attracted the Romans to Britain. We know also, from the official inscriptions on lead pigs, that the argentiferous lead-ores which have been in the past such an important element in that wealth were worked by the Romans surprisingly early in their occupation of this country; Mendip lead under Claudius, the Flintshire ores in the early seventies, the Pateley Bridge mines as early as Agricola. Systematic prospecting for such ores was evidently put in hand as soon as, or even before, the work of conquest was complete. There is no improbability in the suggestion that Whitley Castle was essentially a post for a military garrison supervising the work of slaves, prisoners and criminals in the lead-mines, and that the Maiden Way was the road by which the lead and silver from these mines were dispatched to headquarters.